Adrian Michaels is Group Foreign Editor at the Telegraph Media Group. You can write to adrian.michaels@telegraph.co.uk and follow @adrianmichaels on Twitter.

World Cup 2010: Freedom is not like a wavin' flag

I'm so bored of the official World Cup song. I know this sounds utterly miserable because it's written by a Somalian living in Canada and is African and has people overcoming poverty and chanting about freedom and love and emancipation and all that. But it's just rubbish, isn't it? Listen here to K'naan's song for yourself, over-emotive strings and badly-dubbed kazoo-type noises and all.

Football, as everyone knows, is peculiarly terrible at official tunes. I am still haunted by the military band/70s sitcom Argentina 1978 anthem (snippet here). It fills me with rigged Peruvian results, military juntas and David Coleman shouting "KEMPES. ONE-NIL". The answer, as the Italians showed (or was it the BBC?), is to forget all that and have a fat singer emote opera. Nessun dorma? Too right no one was sleeping when Pavarotti was on the top of his game.

And another thing. Freedom is not like a wavin', waving, or any other type of flag. Freedom is an abstract noun. The sinuous movement of a dolphin's tail is however like a wavin' flag. So is breaking wind under a sheet.